Raising the Bar on Business Intelligence
Let’s face it. Business intelligence as an industry has been a bit of a Quixotic quest. The problem hasn’t been the ends, but rather, the means. What began with basic reporting evolved into a non-stop race with features such as ad-hoc reporting, natural language querying, and semantic layers that ostensibly enable typical business users to suddenly and magically use a highly technical tool to solve their problem on their own. I think it’s safe to declare that BI is not really working well in many cases. In fact, I can sympathize because even as a highly technical person, I often find it easier to write a query or a script rather than arm wrestle with some of the business intelligence tools I’ve used.
I don’t blame BI vendors. The features that have been incorporated in the past few years have been nothing short of amazing, and in the hands of a skilled practitioner, allow serious data analysis. But the key words are “skilled” as in many dozen hours of training as well as “practitioner” as in near daily usage. Let’s just say that BI tools aren’t exactly a walk-up ATM style interface.
Business users in general, and our customers in particular, have been long frustrated by this state of affairs. Business oriented software such as ERPs, procurement platforms, and VMSs have largely approached this problem in a similar manner as the BI players. In fact, many software vendors have approached the problem by licensing and bundling in a third-party BI tool and trying to foist the problem onto them. We’ve taken a different approach tackling the problem head-on with our integrated reporting functionality that is designed from the ground up to be used in context of the application rather than being a bolt-on component that was included as an afterthought.
I’m proud of our reporting capabilities which I believe, and many customers agree, are best-in-class. It can slice and dice, pivot, drill down, and chart data. There are formulas, summaries, roll-ups, drag-and-drop, and all of the other goodies that have come to be expected of a BI tool. However, we also have the added advantage of a seamless user experience, automatic inclusion of any user-defined fields, built-in user-level security and visibility profiles, and true enterprise-wide unlimited dynamic reporting.
That said, there has always been a part of me – fueled by watching how our customers interact with our solution and spending time with them getting to understand how they would like to use their data in our system – largely unsatisfied with the status quo. I had a gnawing feeling that our reporting functionality was a starting point rather than an ending point. Call me a constant critic, but I challenged our team to come up with something better. Something that goes beyond the sales presentation. Something that will be used on a daily basis. Something that will cause customers to change their thinking and direction at both a tactical and strategic level.
I’m proud to say that the team has come back with some very compelling answers and the potential is pretty awesome. I’m not going to say that we’re 100% there, but we’ve been noodling on this problem for the past few years and have made great progress. Now it’s a matter of productizing. Last year, we began to phase in portions of our answer to this BI dilemma, and throughout this year and next, we’ll continue to phase in more components.
I’ll write more about it over the next few months. I’m very much looking forward to sharing our thinking and soliciting feedback.